10 best movie composers you need to know

Think of your favourite scene from a film. Roy Batty’s speech at the end of Blade Runner, the charge of the Rohirrim in The Return of the King, Peter O’Toole dancing along the derailed train in Lawrence of Arabia… 

Whatever it is, ever wondered just why you love it so much? Vangelis, Howard Shore, Maurice Jarre - it’s the music. There’s always music in these iconic moments, and it’s the music that makes them, that really moves you. It’s music that makes great cinema. 

There’s an old adage that you don’t hear the best film music, and there is truth to that. Music works beneath the surface, influencing you subconsciously, enriching the action, guiding your responses, stimulating particular emotions, pulling all the strings without you being aware of. But the very best film music you can hear, and you love hearing it. As the Force theme swells as Luke Skywalker looks out at that binary Tatooine sunset in Star Wars, it’s all you can focus on.

Film music is far better appreciated than it used to be, but - whether it should or shouldn’t be ‘heard’ - it still goes under the radar, not always getting the credit it deserves. Worse still, particularly in classical circles, it’s often derided as a lesser art form. We don’t need to justify that with a response, but suffice to say that it is most emphatically an art in and of itself. And, with extremely particular demands, it is not an easy one to master.

The ten individuals below did master it, however, and many of them did so as one branch of their wider creativity. Collectively, they demonstrate the richness, the complexity, and oftentimes the simplicity of great film music. 

Top movie music composers
 

• John Williams
• Max Steiner
• Bernard Herrmann
• Aaron Copland
• Ennio Morricone
• Tōru Takemitsu
• Ravi Shankar
• Rachel Portman
• Quincy Jones
• Hans Zimmer

John Williams

It’s near impossible to overlook John Williams in any discussion of the best film composers of all time. From Harry Potter to Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park to E.T., the veteran American has penned some of the most popular scores and memorable themes in the history of the big screen. His resumé absolutely littered with classic movie titles, undying acclaim and of course incredible music, Williams arguably bears the finest testament to the greatness of the art of film music.

The story begins in the 1950s, when young ‘Johnny’, as he was called, trained alongside elder film music legends like Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman (composer of the 20th Century Fox fanfare). Paying his dues as a session pianist (you can hear him playing on the soundtrack to 1961’s West Side Story), he started writing scores for television and film at the turn of the 1960s.

An Academy Award in 1971 for the musical film Fiddler on the Roof signalled his rising star, and thereafter Williams really began to find his feet professionally and stylistically. In what was to be a cultural landmark in all kinds of ways, Williams’ 1977 score for Star Wars (later known as Episode IV: A New Hope) completely changed the film-music game. His monumentally symphonic score, which would be the Williams trademark, harked back to Hollywood’s golden age. It staged the orchestral comeback in film music after years in the wilderness, when pop-music scores had their time in the sun. Scoring all nine films in the main saga, and lending his themes to other films and series in the franchise, Williams' achievements have Star Wars at their very heart.

As we’ll see, many great film composers formed one half of an iconic collaborative team. Williams’ partner in crime was Steven Spielberg. Between 1974’s The Sugarland Express - but more famously 1975’s Jaws - and 2022’s upcoming The Fabelmans, Williams scored all but five of 33 Spielberg films. Star Wars aside it was mostly in the vessel of Spielberg’s cinema that Williams’ music became pioneering, influencing not just the widespread use of the orchestra, but also the idiomatic, ‘Neoromantic’ handling of it - exciting dissonance and adventurous harmonic colours working within a largely tonal framework. The winning combination of depth, drama and heart-on-sleeve appeal has earned Williams 52 Oscar nominations in his career, the most of any living person. 

Still, Williams’ scores are as complex and accomplished as anything Wagner or Stravinsky ever wrote. This is not just phenomenal film music, but phenomenal music per se, some of the finest work of the 20th century and beyond - and we haven’t even had time to mention his own work for the concert hall. Coming when the musical intelligentsia looked down on the ‘commercial’ and ‘unartistic’ practice of film composition, Williams’ work proved the worth of his profession and endures as a lasting rebuttal to such senseless elitism. 

Max Steiner

That golden age that Williams’ music channelled was bossed - at least as far as film music is concerned - by the great Max Steiner. This stalwart of the Hollywood industry defined the template of the classical film score that was to be emulated and perpetuated by a multitude of composers for decades, and which still shapes our understanding of film music today.

Born in Vienna in 1888, Steiner spent the 1900s and early 1910s writing concert works and composing for theatre productions across Europe. He was working in Britain in 1914, but as an Austrian he found himself alienated at the outbreak of WWI, so he moved to New York to write for Broadway and in 1929 went west again to Hollywood, California. 

In the late 1920s, silent cinema was on the way out and ‘talkies’ were all the rage. At a time when the very art of the film itself was being defined, the so-called ‘father of film music’ stepped in to compose some of the earliest soundtracks of all time. His 1933 score for King Kong proved to be the touchstone, which would set Hollywood’s musical formula for decades to follow. Steiner went on to score over 300 films, doubtless his most acclaimed work being his music for the 1939 classic, Gone with the Wind. 

Steiner grew up and received his musical training in the era of High Romanticism, a period and style dominated and defined by the likes of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, both of whom basically danced to the tune of Wagner. Their work steered the musical tastes of the day and governed the way that music was understood, taught and written - especially in the Germanic lands they came from, of which Steiner’s Vienna was the musical capital. 

So when Steiner came to Hollywood alongside other German-speaking émigrés who wrote many of the definitive early film scores (such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold), they wrote what they knew. And what they knew was lush, layered and string-led textures in the High Romantic style - which also worked very well in opera, an existing medium that offered a convenient template for narrative musical composition. And this is why classical American film music is so reminiscent of Wagnerian (and, more broadly, Austro-German) Romanticism - extravagant, through-composed, and filled to the brim with leitmotif.

Bernard Herrmann

German though his name looks, Bernard Herrmann (born Maximillian Herman) came from a Russian-Jewish family. But born in the Big Apple itself in 1911, he was all-American. He belonged to - and spearheaded - the generation of composers following Steiner who took on the formula that he established and began to enrich it, subvert it, and develop it in new and exciting ways.

Herrmann’s path to film music came through radio. As music director for CBS, much of his work involved conducting live performances of concert music that were broadcast across the US. In the 1940s in this capacity, he gave a number of important works their American premiere, including the third symphonies of Edmund Rubbra and Charles Ives. But the film breakthrough came in 1941, when, in one of the most astonishing debuts ever, Herrmann composed the music for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, still regarded by many critics as the greatest movie ever made. 

As brilliant as Kane’s music is, it pales in comparison to the work Herrmann supplied for a certain auteur’s films through the 1950s and 1960s. Alfred Hitchcock was the Spielberg to Herrman’s Williams. The pair's collaboration really began to gather pace in the late ’50s as both reached the height of their powers as craftsmen. In scores for Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960) Herrmann began to venture beyond the legacy of Romanticism, experimenting with a dense harmonic vocabulary and Modernist idioms in an attempt to reflect the obsessive and deranged characters that Hitch liked to deal with. The scores aptly demonstrate his ability to characterise in remarkable depth, offering insight into the drama that isn't provided by any other source. Their partnership ended spectacularly with an angry disagreement about the music for 1966’s Torn Curtain. 

Other works of his include the themes to popular American TV series of the era, such as Have Gun – Will Travel (1957) and The Twilight Zone (1959). He composed some highly acclaimed music for French New Wave director François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and his very last project was none other than Taxi Driver (1976), directed by one of the up-and-coming ‘New Hollywood’ figures, Martin Scorsese. Exhibiting remarkably avant-garde techniques and masterful engagement with jazz, this cutting-edge score represented a huge departure for Herrmann, who died the day after it was recorded, on Christmas Eve, 1975.

Aaron Copland

In the story of film music, never before, or since, was so much owed by so many to so few film scores. Although he wrote music for just four features and two documentary films in his lifetime, Aaron Copland’s work casts an enormous shadow over the history of the art form.

Steered by the tutelage of composition master Nadia Boulanger in early-1920s Paris, the first mature works by the Brooklyn-born Copland demonstrated the influence of jazz and the Modernist experiments of Schönberg and Stravinsky. But in the late 1930s, his style would evolve markedly as he began composing in a hugely distinctive populist style. In concert works such as Fanfare for the Common Man and the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring - all of which carried specific connotations of national themes - Copland cultivated an idiom that would become symbolic of America, of its people, culture, landscape and national identity. For the first time, the country had a unique sound of its own in the world of classical music. 

This musical style would first be connected to cinema through Copland’s music for the short 1939 documentary The City. That connection would then be consolidated in his scores for the film adaptation of the classic tale Of Mice and Men that same year, and Our Town in 1940. After writing music for the 1946 documentary The Cummington Story, Copland would return once more to film-scoring in 1949, for the romantic film The Heiress and the contemporary western, The Red Pony, tying his quintessential style once and for all to America’s flagship film genre.

Not by Copland’s own hand, but by those of countless composers who were influenced by this style in their own work, all the hallmarks of his instantly recognisable music were then absorbed into countless films in the ensuing years. The widely voiced harmonies, diatonic dissonances and false relations came to furnish the very soundtrack of American cinema, being especially prevalent in films depicting open American landscapes. Even decades on, you can hear it resound - Disney scores, for instance, owe a massive debt to Copland.

Although it led the way in the early years of composing for the young medium of cinema, American film music still owed its musical attributes to a Germanic legacy. Copland changed all that.

Ennio Morricone

Copland’s filmography totals six: four features and two documentaries. At the other end of the scale there is Ennio Morricone, whose body of work for the screen almost amounts to 500. That’s near half a millennium’s worth of scores for film and television, spanning almost six decades. 

Only a handful of film composers have been anywhere near as prolific. Certainly none have been both as prolific and as influential, especially when you bear in mind that even conveyor-belt Hollywood composers like Steiner left assistants to do their orchestrations. Ennio, meanwhile, like Herrmann - and other composers in the Italian industry, such as the great Nino Rota - was one of those rare composers who did everything themselves. 

Like the quartet we’ve already looked at, Morricone was classically trained. From 1946–54 he studied composition at the Santa Cecilia conservatory in Rome, under the great Goffredo Petrassi. But, as he studied by day, by night he would practise music of a different kind, too. Unbeknownst to the purist Petrassi, Morricone played trumpet in a dance band, and in the mid-1950s began to compose for theatre and radio. This ‘double life’ - as the composer made sense of it - defined his output his whole life long, which he divided between ‘absolute’ music for the concert hall, and ‘applied’ music for film and TV. (That’s right, that tally of 500 isn’t even the whole story.) 

Come the early 1960s, Morricone was a top studio arranger, producing popular songs for many of the great Italian stars of the day. This experience served him well as he drifted into the world of film, with many early film scores incorporating popular-music traits. The music he famously and influentially composed for the lauded spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone demonstrates this best of all. With the likes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West making a worldwide impact, many composers followed suit by exploring popular genres, and these wildly popular and much-imitated scores probably represent his most valuable contribution to film-music history. 

But befitting his diverse apprenticeship, Morricone composed in a broad array of styles and for a far wider range of films, in Italy and beyond, than the fame of his western music would suggest. His versatility was his best attribute. He could construct the most intricate, arresting textures and weave the most deeply lyrical melody. He would engage with every style and genre while manipulating a plethora of eccentric instruments and timbres. Long criminally overlooked for an Oscar, he finally won one in 2016 for The Hateful Eight. Aged 87 at the time, he remains the oldest person to win one. 

Tōru Takemitsu

In Tōru Takemitsu we encounter another figure who managed to straddle the spheres of the cinema and concert hall prolifically and influentially. But, unlike some of his predecessors on this list, who shan’t be named, he did it unflappably. Seemingly without effort he would switch from one mode to the other, composing with an integrated, flexible and multivalent language that he easily adapted to any creative setting that he found himself in. 

To address Takemitsu’s music, we turn to the other side of the globe, and to one of the great lineages in film history - the cinema of Japan. In the medium’s infancy, Japanese filmmakers developed one of the more distinct voices on the world stage, exhibiting real independence from the practices of Europe, the US, and even the other major production hubs of East Asia. Japanese film enjoyed its own golden era at the turn of the 1950s through the films of Yasujirō Ozu, particularly Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953). 

Ozu passed the mantle on to Akira Kurosawa, who surpassed the elder composer as his country’s most celebrated filmmaker after his breakthrough film of 1954, Seven Samurai.  Kurosawa is also Takemitsu’s most renowned collaborator, but they only partnered up twice, in 1970 for Dodes'ka-den and 1985 for Ran. The latter, described by some as the director’s greatest film, is no doubt Takemitsu’s best-known score, exhibiting fusion of period music and experimental sensibilities, calculated integration of silences, and careful management of the slow burn of Kurosawa’s Shakespearean drama. 

By this time, Takemitsu, who had been writing profusely and indiscriminately for film from the mid-1950s, enjoyed a status that allowed him to select his projects more carefully. He frequently read entire screenplays when considering whether to take work on, and liked to be present during filming, so that the atmosphere could stimulate his inspiration. He also fostered fruitful working relationships with directors Masahiro Shinoda, Masaki Kobayashi and Nagisa Oshima, all prominent figures in Japanese New Wave film of the ’60s and ’70s. Not until Joe Hisaishi’s phenomenal work with Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli would the national cinema see a film-music collaboration at these levels. 

Ravi Shankar

In any list of history’s great filmmakers, alongside the likes of Kubrick, Bergman, Hitchcock and Kurosawa, you’re guaranteed to find the name Satyajit Ray. Similarly, any discussion of the Bengali director is bound to focus on the so-called ‘Apu’ trilogy. Released between 1955 and ’59, the loosely bound trio of films is regarded by many as the pinnacle of Indian film, and one of the most monumental achievements in world cinema. Through the vehicle of these important films, Ravi Shankar’s most valuable work as a film composer was done.

Of Bengali extraction, Shankar was born in 1920 in the northern Indian city of Varanasi. He toured India and Europe as a dancer in his youth, but began studying sitar in 1938 in the Hindustani classical tradition. Involving improvised elaboration on scalar melodies known as ‘ragas’, Hindustani classical custom entails a form of spontaneous composition, akin to the performances of jazz masters such as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. 

Melding this fundamentally performative practice with the Western-aligned notion of fixed product, Shankar composed his first film score in the mid-1940s and wrote pieces for the All India Radio orchestra, which he personally formed as the music director for the station. From 1956, and more or less for the remainder of his life, he toured internationally, often performing classically but always looking beyond the traditional in an effort to disseminate the music of India - and his breath-taking sitar-playing - to global audiences. He did this through concerts, written compositions, dozens of commercial recordings, and collaborations with the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass and Beatle George Harrison. 

Film was one of the most effective and influential outlets for his compositional practice. Between Neecha Nagar in 1946 and Genesis 40 years later - via the landmark score for Gandhi in 1982 - Shankar adapted the traditional Hindustani idioms, which had existed for centuries unto themselves, in response to the formal demands of film. It is difficult to look past Ray’s cinema, though, which looms large not only over Shankar’s filmography but also over cinema per se. Complemented by the slow, reflective pace of the films, Shankar’s music brings the Bengali setting to life, offering up a realistic soundtrack to the landscape depicted, capturing young Apu’s youthful exuberance in his virtuosic sitar.

Today the cinema of India is a huge industrial, social phenomenon, and while the vibrant, contemporary sounds of Bollywood (think A. R. Rahman’s Slumdog Millionaire) might seem a world away from Ray’s quietly radical cinema of the 1950s, Shankar nonetheless played his part in laying the musical groundwork for this colossal hub of world culture.   

Rachel Portman

Just as Shankar left the world of film behind in order to focus on performance and recording, Rachel Portman was launching her career in the industry. Through the 1980s she scored a string of productions for television and low-budget feature films, but as her music pricked ears and turned heads, she found herself in the 1990s among the in-demand composers in the industry. She’s still one of its safest, most adaptable pairs of hands.

Portman’s earliest compositions date from the mid-1970s, during her teens. At the end of the decade she studied music at Oxford University, where her creativity was captured by the art of narrative composition. There she began writing for student films and theatrical productions, most notably scoring Privileged (1982), the inaugural film of the Oxford Film Foundation, which featured the screen debuts of peers of hers who were to be household names in film - Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs. A number of projects later, she scored the series The StoryTeller, created by Jim Henman, and the heaps of attention she received for this proved a good omen.

A-list productions came her way in the early 1990s, enabling Portman to collaborate with some of the finest British directors of the day - she scored several prominent TV dramas for Beeban Kidran and worked with the great Mike Leigh on Life Is Sweet in 1990. This laid the groundwork for her highest-profile score yet: Emma in ’96, for which she took home the Oscar for Best Score - only the second woman to do so. Then her renown acquired international proportions, and she went on to score some of the most prestigious blockbusters of the 2000s, like Chocolat (2000), The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and The Duchess (2009).

While Emma may have won the award, Portman’s Oscar-nominated score for the 1999 film The Cider House Rules could be her magnum opus. At any rate, it perfectly demonstrates her typically emotive, lyrical and intensely nostalgic orchestral textures. The score also serves to illustrate the endurance of Copland’s idiomatic legacy, and how it has been repurposed and refined. Portman certainly makes it her own in a tremendous score for a powerful film.

Quincy Jones

The talents of Quincy Jones are numerous: trumpeter, conductor and producer of records, film and television. But he must be most revered for his creative prowess, which manifests in songwriting, arrangement and all-out composition. His most significant body of work as a creative inhabits the world of film - in the 20 years between 1965–85, Jones completed 35 film scores, diverse, accessible and individual.

His stylistic influences are as broad as his resumé. Jones is masterfully versed in rhythm and blues, soul, funk, hip hop, bossa nova, classical music, and all strands of jazz - in fact Time magazine named him one of the 20th century's most influential jazz musicians. And of course he brought all these ingredients to his film scores over the years, from the swingin’ pop arrangements in his 1960s work to the lush orchestral textures of his final film project, Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple.

Jones’ earlier film scores are particularly innovative in their contribution to the wider integration of popular music into film scores in the 1960s. Before that, it had largely been orchestral - Steiner, Herrmann, Copland, etc. While Morricone brought surf guitar to the spaghetti westerns and John Barry enriched 007’s world with jazz, Jones gave African-American popular music a voice in Hollywood. 

This went hand-in-hand with cinema that spoke for that community, at a time of great and long-awaited upheaval that came at the climax of the Civil Rights Movement. This valuable work is perfectly symbolised by Jones’ collaboration with Ray Charles in the title song for the defiant 1967 classic In the Heat of the Night. (Watch and hear the iconic opening sequence here.) Indeed with seven nominations, including two for Best Original Score (1967’s In Cold Blood and Color Purple) and three for best-song awards, he’s the joint-most-nominated African American in the history of the Academy Awards.

Alongside In the Heat, Spielberg’s film is probably Jones’ best known and mostcelebrated work. Check out ‘Miss Celie’s Blues’ from that film on nkoda, which perfectly demonstrates his chameleonic ability to engage with a variety of styles.

Hans Zimmer

Hans Zimmer is widely regarded as the great film composer of the modern era. In fact he’s laid claim to that title for the best part of two decades, after a seemingly unending streak of hugely popular and inevitably excellent blockbuster film scores. Even now, he continues to supply extraordinary music for the cream of the industry, and continues to reinvent himself in the process - his radical score for last year’s Dune won him his second Academy Award. Of his 100+ scores, over 50 have been nominated for major awards.

A performer in the pop sphere in the late 1970s (spot him performing on the music video to ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’), Zimmer moved swiftly into television and film in the ’80s. He partnered up with fellow film composer Stanley Myers in 1982, and many of his earliest scores were born of that collaboration. His first solo effort coming in ’87, a massive break followed swiftly with the successful Rain Man (1988). That score and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) would cement Zimmer’s reputation in the industry.

He really exploded on to the scene in 1990, with the unforgettable, Oscar-winning score to The Lion King, orchestrating Elton John and Tim Rice’s music and lyrics. He would do the same in 1998 with Stephen Schwartz's songs in The Prince of Egypt. Zimmer was recruited for some of the finest films of the 1990s, such as Thelma and Louise (1991), True Romance (1993) and The Thin Red Line (1998), in the last of which he drew influence from southeast Asian traditional music.  

Zimmer’s work is marked by the assimilation of electronic sounds into orchestral textures, to create epic and powerful soundscapes. Although he had experimented with this since his 1980s work with Myers, he took it to a whole new level at the turn of the millennium in his great middle-period scores for Gladiator (2000), The Last Samurai (2003), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2006), Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark Knight’ films (2005–12) and Inception (2010). Expanding these innovations, he then pioneered different and very distinctive approaches in later scores for Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017) and finally Dune.

Zimmer’s not without his critics, who frequently take issue with the overproduction of his scores, but film music - much like everything else - is constantly evolving. We’ve come a long way since the Wagnerian underscore of Steiner and his colleagues and it’s exciting to think where it'll head next. Ludwig Göransson, who seems to have usurped Zimmer as Nolan’s composer of choice, might well be the one to watch. 

Access sheet music from your favourite movie composers
 

Discover all this film music and more on nkoda, the digital music library that can cater to all your sheet-music needs. Start tearing through Barry’s Dances with Wolves. Take to the skies with Williams’ Superman. Jam along to Henry Mancini’s The Pink Panther. You’ll find it all there. 

Here’s a round-up of a few more of nkoda’s most popular titles featuring music from film and television:

• ‘And We Were Lovers’ from The Sand Pebbles, by Jerry Goldsmith
• ‘Any Other Name’ from American Beauty, by Thomas Newman
• ‘The Godfather Waltz’ from The Godfather, by Nino Rota
• ‘Married Life’ from Up, by Michael Giacchino
• Prelude from Ben-Hur, by Miklós Rósza
• ‘The Ring Goes South’ from The Fellowship of the Ring, by Howard Shore
• Suite from Norwegian Wood, by Jonny Greenwood
• Theme from Batman, by Danny Elfman
• Theme from Braveheart, by James Horner
• Theme from James Bond, by Monty Norman
• Theme from Star Trek, by Gene Roddenberry 
• ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ from Toy Story, by Randy Newman

For similar blog content, check out the other articles in the ‘best composers’ series, on the finest figures in classical, medieval, women, modern and video-game music. Best music composers compiles the best from each list - see which film composers were selected.